The Bride Cried On Her Honeymoon—Ingrid Bergman

Rain clouds that had blanketed the sky all morning suddenly lightened as the sun broke through. A limousine came down a deserted street in London’s historic Westminster section and pulled up in front of Caxton Hall. The chauffeur looked up and down the street, and seeing no one there got out and opened the back door of the car. Two of the men went quickly up the stairs of the city hall and rapped on the door. The third, a good-looking man of about forty, in a dark gray suit, followed them. But for a moment he paused, looked up at the sun, and smiled. Then he peered anxiously down the street in the direction from which his limousine had just come. In the distance he saw another car, the twin of his own, coming towards Caxton Hall. He smiled at the two men on the steps above him, pointed towards the fast approaching limousine, and then joined them. The door opened, they entered, and the door closed once again. The other car drew up in front of the hall and two people got out. One of them went up the steps and knocked at the door. The other—an attractive woman in a blue dress, close-fitting white-feathered hat, with a blue-gray mink stole over her shoulders—stopped for a second and also looked up at the heavens. She waved at the two chauffeurs who had parked the limousines across the street, making broad pantomimic gestures as if to say, “See, the sun’s out. In London during the rainy season that’s a miracle, a good omen.’ Then she disappeared into Caxton Hall.

Inside the building, she blinked her eyes to get accustomed to the darkness. The long hall leading to the registry office was dimly lit—this was the first time it was open on Sunday in many years. Her friend, the woman who had entered the building just before her, appeared out of the gloom, took her arm, said, “This way, Ingrid,” and guided her down the corridor. At a door marked Registry Office they stopped. Through the glazed pane they could see blurred shadows and over the transom came the indistinct fuzzing of male voices. Ingrid took a compact from her small purse and daubed at her cheek with a powder puff. Satisfied, she reached to open the door. “Wait,” said her friend. “Do you have something borrowed with you?” “Why, no,” Ingrid answered. Her friend took out a handkerchief and slipped it into Ingrid’s pocketbook, saying, “I took it along because I know I’m going to cry.”

The registry door opened and the good-looking man in the dark gray suit stood in the doorway. “I saw your shadows there,” he said, “and I thought you might be photographers. But it seems we may have given them the slip.”

“Lars,” Ingrid answered, “I feel like we’re all playing in one of those spy movies. The reporters and photographers are enemy agents, and we’re . . .”

Lars Schmidt interrupted, “. . . and we’re holding up the Superintendent Registrar who was kind enough to open up this office on Sunday just for us.”

Lars introduced Ingrid to the official who shook her hand and then said, “All the forms have been filled out. All you have to do is sign your name here, and have your witness sign on this line below.”

Lars gave her a fountain pen and she wrote her name at the bottom of the form: Ingrid Bergman. Then her friend signed her own name. And the ceremony began.

As the Superintendent Registrar read the age-old ceremony, a little sunlight filtered through the windows of the registry room and warmed the plain office. When Lars Schmidt put a simple gold band on the third finger of Ingrid Bergman’s left hand, the ring glinted and gleamed as the sun touched it. And while the Superintendent Registrar was saying the final words of the ceremony—“. . . and so on this twenty-first day of December. 1958, I hereby pronounce you man and wife”—light really blazed.

Only this time it wasn’t the sun. It was flash bulbs going off in rapid succession. A photographer had sneaked into the office and was snapping pictures.

For a moment, Lars and Ingrid ignored him as they kissed and embraced. Then Lars said, “The enemy agent has arrived.”

“What shall we do?” Ingrid asked.

“Let’s smile for him,” Lars answered. “After all, he did get up early in the morning . . . and on Sunday, too.”

The wedding party left the registry office and went towards the front door. Just before they reached the street, Ingrid turned to her friend, the woman who had been weeping throughout the ceremony, and gave her back her handkerchief. “Here,” she said, “wipe your eyes. Don’t be sad. I couldn’t be happier.” Then Lars and Ingrid Schmidt walked out into the bright sunlight.

This time they did not get into separate ears. Ingrid and Lars climbed into one limousine; her friend and Lars’ business associates entered the other. Across the street, the photographer gunned his sports car and started to follow them.

The chase was brief. Lars Schmidt’s chauffeur was skillful and nerveless. He soon left the photographer’s car far in the lurch.

At Westminster’s Swedish Church, the limousine pulled up to the vestry entrance. Inside, the Vicar, Reverend Sven Evander, was waiting for them. He pronounced the benediction and gave the Church’s blessing to the union of Ingrid Bergman and Lars Schmidt.

It was always the children who suffered most, Ingrid thought. First, it had been Pia. Now, would it be Robertino and her twins, Isotta-Ingrid and Isabella?

When they returned to the street, Lars helped Ingrid into the car. Then he bent and kissed her hand, just beneath the wedding ring, and said, “Wait a moment. I’ll be right back.” He went up to a woman who was selling flowers in front of the church, pressed a bill into her hand, and returned with an entire tray of violets. Ingrid took one bouquet, held it up, and buried her face in it. When she raised her head, she was crying. She fumbled in her pocketbook for a handkerchief, realized she had returned it to her friend, and reached over and pulled Lars’s out of his vest pocket. He whispered something to her, she laughed, and the car pulled away.

At a swank London hotel the other members of the wedding party were waiting in a private dining room for the Schmidts. And the photographer, the same one who had crashed the wedding, was waiting there, too. “How did you get here?” Lars asked.

“I followed the wrong car, the other car,” he answered, “but I guess this is just my lucky day.”

“Looks like it is,” Lars answered. “Well, if you can’t lick them, join them. Won’t you be our guest for lunch? But no pictures while we’re eating. All right?”

“Fine,” said the photographer, hungry.”

And he had plenty to eat, as did all the rest. Lobster and turkey salad and Swedish cheese and bottles and bottles of French champagne. And when the wedding luncheon was over, Lars invited him to accompany them to the airport in their limousine. “Just as far as the airport,” Lars emphasized, “not to Paris. We don’t want you following us there.”

“I may be there before you,” he said.

“Oh, no,” Ingrid groaned.

In Paris during their two-day honeymoon, they managed to dodge photographers—the persistent one who had tracked them down in London, and all the others as well. But when they went to their home at La Grange aux Monines (Harvest Barn) near the village of Choisel about 25 miles from Paris, things began to go badly.

After her first joyful moments of reunion with her son, 9-year-old Robertino, and her twin daughters, 7-year-old Isabella and Isotta, Ingrid discovered that her most dependable servants, Jeannette and Pierre, had left her without notice. The nursemaid was still there, but the house was quite a mess and someone had to clean up a bit. So Ingrid, without unpacking her bags, began to straighten up. And Lars, not to be outdone in the emergency, went into the kitchen and began to cook dinner.

When the cooking was well under way—and the house was beginning to look livable again—Ingrid and Lars gave the children the presents they had bought for them in Paris and London. And then the entire family took a short walk around the estate.

First they visited the stables and Lars gave a piece of sugar to Robertino’s special horse. Then they went past the chicken coop and sheep pen and strolled through the gardens. Ingrid turned to Lars, as the children ran ahead, and said, “We must plant violets, lots of violets. From now on, they’re my favorite flower.”

Suddenly there was a huge commotion down by the front gate. Lars ran down towards the high wall which protected the house and grounds from trespassers. The watchdogs were barking and bellowing, and men’s voices could be heard from the top of the wall. When Lars arrived, he saw they were photographers and he asked them to leave. Instead, they pointed their cameras at him and started snapping pictures. Lars stood still, helplessly, and then turned and motioned for Ingrid and the children to return to the house. Some of the cameramen had turned telescopic, long-range lenses on Lars’ wife and the children, and were clicking away. One photographer jumped down from the wall onto the grounds of the estate. This was too much! Lars unleased one of the huge watchdogs, and the cameraman’s friends pulled him up to safety. But they did not go. They just stood on the wall, shooting picture after picture of Lars and his retreating family.

Back in the house, Ingrid called their friend, Robert Frelon, the mayor of Choisel, who also happened to be the contractor who was converting their estate of 22 little rooms into less and larger rooms. In a matter of moments, the gendarmes arrived and drove the newsmen off the walls. At the height of the commotion, Ingrid reappeared on the lawn and cried hysterically to Lars, “Can’t they ever leave us alone? At our wedding! Even in a hospital! And now they are at our own home.”

Even in a hospital! Lars knew exactly what she meant. She had told him all about it, and of course he had read about it in the newspapers at the time. And as he led her past the herb garden, the vegetable garden, and the flower garden, past the tennis court he was building for Robertino, towards the house, she remembered the day that Robertino was born.

The day that Robertino was born . . . February 3rd, 1950. Four months before her divorce became final from Peter Lindstrom, the day she gave birth to Roberto Rossellini’s son in Rome: And the same photographers and reporters who had followed her and her lover to Stromboli, after she had left her husband Peter and her child Pia in Hollywood, and who had prowled up and down outside her apartment in Rome during the eighth and ninth months of her pregnancy, wouldn’t even leave her in peace for a few hours now that she was actually having her baby.

She heard screams and shots, and one of the nuns told her that a photographer had tried to scale the walls of the Villa Margherita Clinic and had failed. She heard scuffling in the hall and shouts, and another nun told her that a reporter had disguised himself as a doctor and had tried to get to her room. And then she heard nothing at all as they wheeled her into the delivery room, nothing until the doctor leaned over her and said, “It’s a boy.”

But later she heard yells, and screams, and the sound of feet running up and down the corridors of the hospital. Two hours after Robertino was born, the mob of people outside the walls had battered down the front gates and poured into the hospital halls. Photographers and reporters had raced through the rooms, hunting for her. The nuns had formed a human wall outside her door and that alone had stopped them from breaking in. That—and the Carabinieri who had finally got the mob under control.

During the remainder of the time she had remained at the hospital, armed guards stood in front of her room day and night. She was forbidden to open her windows, for in a building across the street photographers took turns in training telescopic cameras on her room, hoping to get pictures of her and her baby. . . .

he memory faded as she saw Robertino and his sisters standing in the doorway of their home. Ingrid dropped on her knees and cradled the three youngsters in her arms. The little girls began to cry. Robertino squirmed uncomfortably for a moment, and then he dropped his head and buried it in his mother’s hair.

In the excitement, they had all forgotten for a moment that it was Christmas eve.

The next morning the children were up bright and early and Ingrid and Lars joined them in opening the presents. Robertino had given his mother a camera, and she laughed and cried as she held it. The girls insisted that she take their pictures. So soon the whole family was out in front of the house. Ingrid posed Lars and Robertino and Isabella and Isotta together. Out in the sunlight, with the huge wall protecting them from the outside world, all was peaceful, all was safe. She laughed . . . and snapped the picture.

At noon Roberto Rossellini’s chauffeur arrived and the children were taken to Paris to spend the rest of the holidays with their father there. This was the agreement between Roberto and Ingrid, but as usual when she saw them drive away, she had the horrible feeling, for a fleeting second, that she would never see them again. Lars put his arm around her and said, “They’ll be back in a week. Don’t worry. Let’s go in. I have to cook lunch.”

Two days later, on December 27th, Lars and Ingrid drove down to Choisel to pick up the evening paper. There in headlines was the news: Roberto Sues For Custody Of Ingrid’s Children. Ingrid turned white. She had not been served any papers, she had not been told about this by Rossellini. Under the separation agreement, she had custody of the children and their father was allowed visiting rights. That was all.

And now this, with no warning! Impossible!

Lars read the news story to her. Rossellini was claiming the children on “moral, religious and practical grounds.” He contended that “for a long time Miss Bergman has been living together with Lars Schmidt.” He maintained that both Miss Bergman and Mr. Schmidt “are Protestants while the children were baptized in the Catholic Church,” and he recalled that under the terms of the decision giving custody of the children to Miss Bergman they “were to be educated in the Italian language at least until they were 18 years of age.” Now that Bergman and Schmidt live more than 25 miles from Paris, he went on, “it would be really impractical as well as a sacrifice for the children to have to ride every day to and from the nearest Italian school, which is in Paris.”

Rossellini stated he intends to reside permanently in Paris. He is willing, he said, to allow Ingrid Bergman to spend one month each summer with the children, and expects her to contribute one-half the expense of their upbringing.

“One month,” Ingrid said, “one month.” And that’s all she said. All the way home Lars tried in vain to comfort her. But she sat next to him white and dry-eyed, gazing ahead . . . at nothing. It was only when they entered the gates of their estate, when they were safe again behind their protecting walls, that she said something else. Now tears flowed down her face as she said, “It always happens at Christmas,” and again Lars knew, without her having to tell him, exactly what she was talking about . . .

It always happens at Christmas . . . It had been just one year ago, Christmas 1957, that Ingrid had decided to reunite with her estranged husband, Roberto, for just one day “for the sake of the children.”

A little more than a month earlier she had left Robertino, Isotta and Isabella in Rome’ in the care of Roberto’s younger sister, Marcella Mariani, and had flown to London. Meanwhile, Roberto himself was off somewhere for a rendezvous with the “other woman,” Sonali Das Gupta. Neither Ingrid nor Roberto had told the children about their separation, and to help ease the wrench of parting, she had left behind a mountain of toys for the youngsters. In London, she had been desperately looking for an Italian school for them, for in negotiating for their legal separation, Rossellini had insisted they be given an Italian edu) cation.

On December 23rd, she flew in from Paris and was met at Rome’s Ciampino Airport by the three children and their Aunt Marcella. As she came down the ramp, the youngsters broke away from their aunt and ran towards her, shouting “Mama, mama, mama.” She dropped her armful of packages—Robertino kicked aside a huge one with pink elephant ears peeping out the top in his rush to get to his mother—and swung the three children up in her arms. And then they all drove “home.”

On Christmas eve, she took the three of them to a neighborhood party for two hours. But on Christmas day, their celebrating was strictly a family affair. Roberto and Ingrid were the perfect father and mother—helping Robertino run his electric train and oohing and ahing when the twins proudly promenaded their new Parisian dolls. The pink elephant was a huge success, especially when it turned out that all three youngsters could sit on it at one time. There was turkey dinner with all the trimmings. A perfect day, a perfect performance. About this, at least, she and Roberto were in complete agreement, after they had heard the children’s prayers and tucked them in to bed. True, the youngsters had cried when they started to leave the room. But that was natural; they were overtired and overexcited.

It was not until she was about to fly back to London with the children, just before New Year’s, that she discovered that theirs had not been the perfect performance. A few days before Christmas, Robertino’s second-grade schoolmates had told him that his parents were separating because his father “loved an Indian woman more.” The boy had told his sisters that “Mama and Papa are having trouble because of some Indian lady, but we must play that we don’t know about it.” So the children had put on a perfect act, never letting their parents know that they knew.

And when she discovered the truth, how they had covered their confusion and pain with laughter and love, she thought her heart would literally break. And their “good night” tears; now they took on added meaning too. It was always the children who suffered most . . . Robertino, Isabella, Isotto . . . and long ago, Pia. . . .

Ingrid looked at Lars and repeated, “It always happens at Christmas.” And then she hid her head in her hands.

Lars went to the telephone: First he called a doctor to come and administer a sedative to his wife; then he phoned lawyers and newspapermen. The counter-action to Rossellini’s suit had begun.

On January 21, Ingrid Bergman faced Rossellini for the first time since they had spent the day together for the sake of the children on Christmas day, 1957. Both of them appeared before Judge Rene Drouillat in a stormy ninety-minute session.

Bitter and wan after the encounter, Ingrid said: “Out of spite and jealousy, Rossellini wants to get my children away from me. He won’t get them.”

For his part, Rossellini said that he did not wish to deprive Ingrid of the children. He said he was not resentful but was “just a father who wants to give his children what he believes is best.”

Three days later, on January 24, 1959, the telephone rang at the Schmidts’ home near Choisel. Lars in the living room and Ingrid in an upstairs bedroom picked it up at the same second. It was their lawyer in Paris. Judge Drouillat had just handed down his decision. He had awarded temporary and conditional custody of the children to their mother.

Upstairs, the telephone gently clicked down. Downstairs, Lars listened to the legal details: Rossellini might have the children on weekends; the children must continue to attend the Lycee Italien in Paris; and so on and so forth.

But now even Lars wasn’t listening. For Ingrid was by his side, and although there were tears in her eyes, she was laughing. He hung up the phone, and together they walked out into their garden.

“Remind me to call the Mayor,” he said, “and tell him to change the population figure at the town hall. Up until now it’s been 275; from now on it’s 280.”

Again Ingrid laughed . . . and Lars laughed with her.

THE END

—BY JIM HOFFMAN

INGRID BERGMAN STARS IN “THE INN OF THE SIXTH HAPPINESS” FOR TWENTIETH.

 

It is a quote. PHOTOPLAY MAGAZINE APRIL 1959